


All That Long Hair in the Grave

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-13
Updated: 2007-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You realize what's done is done, it's far too late to be saved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That Long Hair in the Grave

**Author's Note:**

> done for the fic15 prompt "kill", and written before Battle of the Labyrinth was even published, if that gives you an idea of how old it is.

Riptide is perched on hooks above his bed, like some men might hang hunting trophies or some women might hang scenes of oceans in pastels.

Sometimes, when he meets his wife at the bedroom door, hands too big on the curves of her hips, he'll see the metal flash angrily at the corners of his eyes before he closes them to kiss her. Poseidon still thinks of him, it means, still thinks of him and hates him, as much as a god can ever hate a half-blood, seeing as most of the time they're busy trying to ignore their existences.

Nico fought for Luke. Bianca fought for Percy.

But Percy and Annabeth are in the backyard, curled underneath the dirt as if they merely fell asleep there on a sunny afternoon, and because Nico is a son of Hades, he sees Annabeth's hair, golden like the sunshine he can barely stand, rotting away in her grave, and he remembers the look in Percy's eyes, right before he died. Nico himself spends his afternoons working at the local canned meats factory, earning shit for money, and his evenings watching ESPN.

It's the American dream.

....

Nico doesn't care what it makes him. He knows the neighbors whisper to each other over kitchen sinks with yellow rubber gloves, watching Bianca pull weeds out of the garden. "Who does that to their _sister?"_

"A demi-god," he wants to tell them. "A man who tastes death at the back of his throat, who hears his friends screaming and dying for the gods who will never acknowledge them even now. I speak with bodies in the graves and dead men tell their tales, and I feel, like a bad bowel movement, the instant somebody dies. I felt my own sister die." And a life for a life, he brought her back, his hand in hers, two golden drachmas over her eyes so she couldn't look back. "You live with that for one day, and then try and preach to me about your morals."

Other days, he just wants to laugh and say, "Haven't you ever read mythology? We marry our sisters all the time!"

....

He comes home from work, and the neighbors watch him from their kitchen windows, stripping a roast over their sinks, as Bianca comes flying off the porch, ignoring the steps entirely, and he catches her around the waist and spins her around, and it's only then that he feels like he has any energy to live at all.

She's Bianca; he's loved her all his life, and he cannot point to a moment in his past where she was not with him (there are some, of course, but nobody talks about the war, about Kronos, about a little boy betraying his rescuers to raise his sister from the dead) and he does not want a future without her.

While his Mythomagic cards rot at the bottom of a chest and the Jacksons rot in the backyard and Riptide glimmers over the bed, Nico closes his eyes and kisses his sister, his wife, his anchor, his only friend and the only constant face in a long line of deaths, and she kisses him back.

It had been years before she stopped kissing him like she was enduring him and started kissing him like she loved him.

He wonders, sometimes, if she hates him for making her break her oath, for keeping her close to him like a tethered thing when he sees her looking towards the mountains like she is imagining the Hunt.

But when he asks her over strawberry pancakes, voice petulant, she smiles at him and touches his face, his shoulders, his hands, and tells him, "You are the only thing I want to protect in this life."

He dreads the day she asks him to free her.

....

"Son of Hades, why?"

"Do not judge me, son of Poseidon," Nico had spat, and he will never, ever forget the look in Percy Jackson's eyes, nor the way he held his wife as her mortal wounds seeped their blood into his skin. "You were once ready to tear the world apart to save your mother. I am doing the same for my sister."

Bianca never asks him what she cost him, but she is a daughter of Hades, and he knows Percy and Annabeth Jackson's bones speak to her as clearly as they do to him.

A hero's fate is never happy.

Nico watches the sway of his sister's hips and the way her face lights up as she wiggles a spoon full of baby food in front of their daughter's face, and is glad he was never a hero.


End file.
